Collect, Blog, and Share Clips of the Web with Amplify

Amplify allows you to grab entire snippets of the Web, including stories, images, and media, and post it on your clips blog for the world to see. Once you've posted it, you can share those snippets again with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.

Simplified blogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous are increasingly popular these days, but what both services lack is an easy way to grab entire pieces of Web pages, re-post them, and share them with friends on other social networks.

Enter Amplify, a service from the creators of Clipmarks. Amplify allows you to grab entire snippets of the Web, including stories, images, and media, and post it on your clips blog for the world to see. Additionally, once you've posted it, you can share those snippets again with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.

Amplify is built using the same technology that made Clipmarks popular. Instead of saving snippets of the Web for your own retrieval later, the developers thought it might be useful for you to be able to share those interesting pieces of the Web with your friends in the form of a blog. Amplify allows you to do this by giving you a clips blog (the developers unfortunately call it your "clog") where your Web clippings are uploaded as soon as you take them. You can set the entries on your clog as private so only members you've added as friends can see them, or public so the world can read.

All you have to do is install the Amplify add-on for Firefox and click the Amplify icon in your toolbar when you're ready to take clippings. When you click the icon, the clipping toolbar appears and allows you to select images, entire sections of text, and other page elements for publication on your clog. When you're finished selecting the parts you want to re-publish, you can post them to your clog and add your own comments to preface the entry. If you have multiple interests and want to keep them separate, you can even create multiple clogs for different purposes.

If you're a Clipmarks user, you'll be pleased to hear that Amplify allows you to import the information from your Clipmarks account to your Amplify pages. The service is planning on adding support for Google Notebook users soon. The service also allows you to clip information straight from RSS feeds through feed readers like Google Reader, but posts the URL of the actual content, not the link to your feed reader.

Once you have your clippings posted on your clog, you can share them with your friends on Twitter or Facebook by linking your Amplify account with your account on one of those services. Amplify makes it easy; you can even sign in to Amplify using your Facebook or Twitter credentials, linking your accounts automatically. When you post something new to your Amplify clog, a snippet of your intro and a shortened URL to the full post is also published to your Twitter or Facebook page.

In a way, Amplify is what I had hoped Clipmarks would be: in addition to giving you an easy way to take entire clippings of the Web that you can return to and review later, the service allows you to share those interesting tidbits with the world. This way you give other people a way to interact with you, comment on your clippings, and see what you're reading on the Web that you think is interesting and worth sharing. Since Amplify allows you to hook into your Twitter or Facebook account, the service doesn't have to compete with those networks for attention and can compliment them instead.Back to top